Put our money where our brain is, not our mouth.

A former head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security calls it "regrettable" that Canada plans to withdraw from the conflict in Afghanistan.

He is certainly entitled to his opinion, and the following is undoubtedly true:

Chertoff believes the challenge of this century is "ungoverned space," where there is no government that can maintain order. Those areas of the world can give terrorists room to thrive, he said.

This is the part that I take issue with, not the concept, but the scale and the execution:

"It would be very short-sighted to stint on the investment now and face the consequences in five years," he said. "So I think President Obama is dead-right in what he is doing."

I read something a few days ago about U.S. Special Forces troops sweeping into Mogadishu with helicopters, hitting a specific target, killing him, and extracting with no losses; it's like "Blackhawk Down" except that it worked. The key phrase in the article was "specific intelligence" and THAT is where the investment that Mr Chertoff talks about should be made.

If the place is ungovernable, who are we to think that we can make it so? Even empires had a hell of a time subjugating barbarians; beating them in the field, sure, conquering the place, sure, but holding it? Iraq might have worked if the Yanks had just decapitated the leadership, but I've made that argument before. Superimposing government can work, but building one in a vacuum? Ask another question, what is the Aim?

Yes, "Selection and Maintenance of the Aim" is the foremost of most Principals of Warfare that you will find, although the exact terms will vary. End state is what? Terrorists have no safe havens to attack us from with impunity? I can think of a lot cheaper (in blood and treasure) ways to achieve that than bogging ourselves down and making us the fixed target as we wallow about trying to rebuild a failed state.

The people who live in these places have more pressing motivation than we do for their countries to function, and if THEY can't make it work that doesn't augur well for us to do so. Cynical for damned sure, but I'm still waiting for someone to prove me wrong.

If you want something done right...

In the aftermath (sort of) of the latest Afghan election, there is a lot of comment from various sources about the corruption of the incumbents. If anything, this is probably understated, as the most lucrative parts of the economy is the drug trade, and the Karzai family is deep into it.

I have talked to Afghans in the heart of Taliban territory and they aren't happy when we wreck their stuff and kill them by accident, but they don't want us to leave. Part of that is economic; we break something or tear up their fields, we pay for it and that's a better source of hard currency than they'll get pretty much anywhere else. Bigger than that though, the Taliban are as miserably austere a group as have ever walked the earth and even conservative Pashtuns don't want to live under their rules.

Leaving the problem of how best separate the wolves from the sheep for the moment, back to running the country. The question I have (and I don't have an answer!) is; should we just kick out the government and run the place?

Afghans are famous for uniting to drive out foreign invaders, so on the face of it it sounds like a fantastically bad idea. In the current situation, where their government is seen as a corrupt Western puppet anyway, I don't see what we have to lose.

The people kowtow to the Taliban partly in desperation for any kind of stability, partly in fear, and partly because they know that we (and consequently the Karzai government) won't be sticking around forever. In the meantime we pour in blood and treasure in an ultimately fruitless attempt to get the country on it's feet.

My proposal: decapitate the government and replace it with competent Westerners. Use the British Raj as a model as far as possible and keep locals where you can, replace them where you can't. You have to keep the Bremers out but I really don't see it as being either more expensive or more dangerous than what we're doing right now.

The ANA is already stood up, although it has a long way to go and honestly it may never get all the way there. The police are a disaster that is being somewhat managed, and the biggest challenge is to damp down the corruption to something reasonable (for that part of the world). Right now the public distrusts the government despite its' "nativeness". My gut tells me that they would not rise up against a foreign administration as long as it got the job done.

This does not suggest that things will be all rainbows and frisky puppies if we kick Karzai et al to the curb, spray the opium fields and cut out the middlemen from our aid to the country. I just don't think it would be worse, and people might do what they did in Iraq and start talking to us if they think we can get the job done.

Michael Yon described the US military in Iraq as a "tribe", specifically a powerful one which could be trusted to be neutral and just. Afghanistan is NOT Iraq, and that isn't a good thing in this case. The educated middle class of Iraq doesn't exist in Afghanistan, so we'd have to work with warlords, but if you have the biggest stick on the block you can keep them in line. Be "professional" about running that place and you might gain that (probably grudging) respect from the public.

Incredibly difficult, complex and most certainly bloody, but a sliver of long-term hope. We can extrapolate from what we're doing now, and everybody says it'll take a generation at least. I say throw the dice; go big or go home, and soon at that.

Third one’s a charm…

Holy fuck, this AGAIN!

Omar Khadr's lawyer says his client is being unfairly punished by the Conservative government, which has steadfastly refused to request his repatriation from Guantanamo Bay despite court rulings ordering it to do so.

I have addressed this schiesskopf (and to a lesser extent his whole family) here, but it just won’t die. As for me I’ve not a lot new to say, but opinions/observations follow.

1. Khadr was shot twice by American soldiers. This suggests (and there is a lot of other evidence as well) that the 5.56x45mm NATO assault rifle round has insufficient killing power and should be replaced. Obviously you have to shoot people three times at least to make sure they don’t come back to bite you.

2. His lawyer says that the “Harper Government” picks and chooses which Canadians it’s going to help. Of bloody course they do. The “Canadian” in question was an enemy combatant fighting an allied army in a country replete with terrorist training camps, one or more of which Khadr and his dad were attending. This is no mere passport problem, and it CERTAINLY has nothing to do with him being “a person of colour”.

3. The comments section of the CTV article I linked to is revealing. Roughly 2/3 of posters are quite happy to keep Khadr out of the country, probably permanently, but for sure long enough for the Americans to try him. These same people (and I’m one of them, go figure) forecast Khadr suing the government (hence you and me) for some massive amount whenever he arrives back.

I don’t want him back, but I’ll look at it as impassively as possible: as long as it costs us less to keep him out than to bring him back, we should. He’ll get to Canada eventually, and let’s face it, he’s a lot less dangerous than any number of other people who are already here. No reason to hurry that along though; Guantanamo is as much jail time as this bad apple will see and a bit more will be good for him.

We will remember them, but who are "we"?

LONDON -- Harry Patch, Britain's last survivor of the trenches of World War I, was a reluctant soldier who became a powerful eyewitness to the horror of war, and a symbol of a lost generation.

Patch, who died Saturday at 111, was wounded in 1917 in the Battle of Passchendaele, which he remembered as "mud, mud and more mud mixed together with blood."

Mr Patch was the last fighting soldier of any nation in that conflict, and with his passing the Great War (WW1) will soon pass almost into myth.

I was asked last Remembrance Day to give a speech as a veteran to a local high school. I accepted rather reluctantly, not because it's not worth doing (quite the opposite) but because I can't put my experiences in the same league as the men who fought in the World Wars. This being said, I was all they had so I stepped up.

A key point I tried to make to the kids was that the veterans of the mass-army wars of the 20th Century are nearly gone. That is pretty parochial I suppose, as there are lots of survivors of the Iran-Iraq war, loads of American soldiers who saw a lot of shit in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the wars for the soul of Western Civilization are the ones that really got our attention.

Time will tell if those of us who served in the GWoT in it's various guises will be accorded any sort of equivalence for what we were trying to do but I'm guessing not. There are several reasons for that.

First is that it's not the epic struggle that were the World Wars. Korea was on that scale, at least locally, and even that first successful example of the Cold War strategy of "containment" (remember Communism?) never caught the public the same way.

Second, and not really separate from the first, is the sense of sacrifice. Right now, Canada's Army is at war, but the country (and even the other branches of the CF) is not. There is no rationing, no conscription, no "We Want YOU" posters everywhere, and bluntly, not enough soldiers are dying. This is war reduced to personal, not national, tragedy and it directly effects hardly anyone.

Third, it's the lack of a sense in the public of an existential threat to our way of life. Part of that problem is that few people give much thought to what exactly is "our" way of life, and our Diversity agenda has a lot to do with that. Beer companies are about the only thing I can think of offhand that present a "Canadian" identity, but the "I am Canadian" spots etc. aren't the sort of thing that will draw the youth of the country to the colours to defend it. Osama Bin Laden is no Kaiser Bill (except that they're in all likelihood just as dead), and not a lot of people are concerned about the jackbooted tread of Islamic zealots stomping over our precious institutions.

What we have now is "The Long War", which will never be one to end all others. I don't know that Remembrance Day will mean much to most people in 20 years when the last of the WW2 vets has passed away. I guess that it'll be left to people like me, but I can't imagine the King, PM, etc. will make much of an address when the last of us passes away.

That's for the best, as it would mean that there was never again the mass slaughter of the WWs, but I hope that people won't completely forget those generations when they're no longer around to speak for themselves. They did a lot for us and suffered terribly for it.

The last straw?

Time to leave:

Unsure of whether civilians were inside the compound, the Marines had an interpreter talk to the insurgents, said an official who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly. After some time, a number of women and children left the compound, the military official said.

The insurgents denied that any more civilians were inside, the official said, but the Marines held their fire anyway. About 4 p.m. (7:30 a.m. ET), in the midst of the standoff, another group of women and children emerged from the compound, the official said. As of 4:30 p.m., the Marines were holding all fire and waiting out the insurgents, the official said.

Finally, a screaming woman emerged from the compound with a bullet wound to her hand, Pelletier said. Then, another group of women came out, covered from head to toe, according to custom, he said. The Marines attended to the wounded woman while the others walked away.

When the Marines went into the compound, they discovered that it empty, Pelletier said. That's when they realized the fighters had dressed up as women to escape, he said.

This is an absolute farce. Despite the rather abysmal level of writing demonstrated by this CNN piece, it is obvious that the RoE (Rules of Engagement) in Afghanistan have tightened to the point that they have throttled any hope we may have had of getting the upper hand on these fanatics.

If it's as simple as waiting until you find some women (rarely seen, but not scarce in Afghanistan) and hiding amongst them long enough to get changed, we'll never kill any Taliban again.

I had hoped to stay away from this subject, but even if Despair is a sin, I'm feeling a bit of it about the prognosis for any of these fights. Some of that was triggered by an article on Algeria that I read yesterday, suggesting that the government is beating them militarily, but the pressure the Salafists are putting on the average Mohammed on the street is getting the job done.

Balance of force, balance of terror, whatever you want to call it. People can be intimidated by those who show themselves capable of killing and torturing them. Rare is the person who will prefer to be killed (unpleasantly, at that) than to knuckle under.

One of the key problems in Algeria that tipped the balance against the non-islamists was the government's decision to disarm all of the civilian "Patriot" units in the towns and villages. These were standard Local Defence groups (from what little I've been able to find about them), apparently quite effective at keeping the bad-asses out, and were disbanded by the government when the islamists had been "defeated".

Those fuckers are defeated when they're all dead, which takes a lot of work and a relentless bloody-mindedness. There is the eternal argument that if you give arms to these local groups there's no saying who will end up with them. This is a valid point if there is a scarcity of weapons, but in this early 21ieme siecle those are about as hard to get as the clap. Assault weapons are readily available to anyone that c an afford them, and they're not too expensive. What does make them scarce is government control.

The best way to contain the bad guys is to allow people to defend themselves in a locally-organized fashion, to fill in the gaps that the army and police can't manage. That may not work in Afghanistan, so a different plan is necessary.

As a refinement of my previous position on splitting the country and backing the non-Pashtun parts of it, go back to backing warlords. Support the ones who oppose the Taliban, and obliterate their compounds from orbit if they turn on you. Your aid should be lots of tanks, artillery, low-tech stuff that needs to be centralized to be effective. That gives them firepower, and gives you fixed targets to hit if they step out of line. Divide and contain, if not conquer, has worked forever.

In any event, get the hell out of Afghanistan because our current capacity is rapidly being shown to be incapacity. Some Surge; more troops just gives more chances to not do the job.

Panic-demic

I was hoping this whole "swine flu" thing would fade away when it was obvious that hardly anyone was dying from it, but no such luck as yet.

The WHO is claiming 90K cases reported so far, but I'm sure there are a lot more. There have been at least one and possibly two cases in my immediate family, and we didn't panic or report it. There are the vague reports of "flu parties" where parents try to generate some herd immunity amongst their offspring. Were this another Spanish Flu this would be grounds for criminal child endangerment charges, but with the almost negligible death rate I personally think it could be useful, or at least not harmful.

If one remembers the hoof-and-mouth livestock epidemic in the UK a few years back you can see one way of treating an epidemic. Burning everyone who contracts H1N1 would cause an armed revolution in most places, and should in the rest, so the comparisons are not meant to be direct. I have heard that a certain level of herd immunity can be generated if things are allowed to run their course. I don't know if that is in fact the case, but it sounds plausible; that said, economic factors in the agricultural business would never permit that to happen.

So what is driving the WHO and various agencies in keeping this "pandemic" bandwagon rolling? The media "helps" this along of course, but the whole thing smacks of bureaucratic momentum to me. Whole staffs have been expanded at the UN and elsewhere as new empires are carved out of any current crisis.

That could lead to various screeds about ever-expanding bureaucracies and governments, but not right now. No, I was just noting the persistence of this swine flu thing despite the fact that the regular garden-variety flu is still killing at least ten times as many people with (almost) no one remarking upon it. Good old media and special-interest scare mongering.

It's a bit like like passing a crippling carbon tax bill in the US with absolutely no actual evidence that it needs to be done, let alone that the 1500 pages of the Waxman-Markey bill will do anything other than hasten the decent of the USA into de-industrialization and thence to bankruptcy and irrelevancy. Happy July 4th, by the way...

There will always be an English.

I wrote an essay in university about the “Cultural Legacy of the British Empire”, and this article in Foreign Policy comes to the same (largest) conclusion that I did, albeit from a different angle.

The English language (in various forms) is overtaking the other largest cultural artefact of the B.E., football (soccer). There are already far more Indians speaking English than there are Brits, full-stop, and the numbers continue to rise worldwide. I won’t rehash the linked article, but I wanted to make a point about it’s conclusions as to the cause of this.

The article mentions a linga franca, and English is certainly that for the foreseeable future. I contend, however, that the reason this is so is because of the historical accident that the two succeeding world-spanning empires both spoke English (or near enough in the case of the Americans).

The 350 million or so Indians who speak English don’t do so because of America; neither do any of the Anglophone African countries, the former Dominions (Australia, Canada & New Zealand), or even the USA itself. The USA is itself a legacy of The British Empire 1.0, one which absorbed most of the potential of the U.K. and created a continental power that stepped into the colonial power vacuum after WW2.

If anyone can find a contrary example I’ll stand corrected, but I do not believe that there has ever before been two successive empires that spoke the same language, certainly not any big enough to have more than regional influence.

One million words (the number of them now supposedly in the the English language) is a hell of a lot, and that number goes a long way to explain the appeal of English. It’s a mongrel language which takes the best from other languages to cover new concepts. Just like biological mongrels, this hybridization keeps it strong and healthy. I don’t think any of my “words” have made it in yet, but there’s obviously room…